Unevenness Foretold

Follow this back to: 'Field', 'Boundary', 'Friend', 'Lover'

On the evening of the fourth day, the older women and the children returned. Like the missing parts of his vocabulary, Wals had not even been aware that there was anyone missing from the community of the courtyard. It never occurred to him that there might be older women or young children that lived in the courtyard as well.

Before they came, Manueline made him fill the water pot right up to the top. She would not allow him into the women's room but she brought out all the beds and had him beat and air them filling the courtyard with a dusty, grassy odor that made him sneeze.

Manueline tried to teach him the words she needed to explain the coming of the women and children; there was not enough time so she resorted to drawing little stick figures in the dust of the courtyard showing the young men with kilts; old men with kilts and shawls; women with long cloths wrapped around their bodies. They were all standing in a line with the old man with the shawl at the right of the line one of the women between two men to the left of the old man, the other two women on the extreme left.

She pointed to all of them, naming them and pointing to where they slept in the courtyard. She stopped to see that he understood. She drew some small people to the left of the figure representing herself, she drew some women with shawls to the right of the old man. She pointed to these figures indicating where they slept in the courtyard. Pointing especially to the old women, bowing her head, looking very serious, indicating he should do the same. She was not satisfied until he would bow simply when she pointed to the old women.

She stopped a moment, looking at him, looking worried. Wals understood there was something about the procession of people drawn in the dust that worried her, though he could not make out what it was. It almost seemed to him that the mere fact that she had drawn them at all was a cause of concern for her. He smiled at her nodding his head seeking to reassure her.

Wals slept that night with a vision of the procession Manueline had drawn in the dust moving through his mind. He felt as though something of Manueline's anxiety had made its way into him and now wandered through his dreams, watching the procession, fretting over it, wondering what it would bring.

It was a curious mixture of the people he knew from the courtyard, each in their appointed place in the line, and the other stick figures whom he had never seen before. The stick figures at times took on some aspect of the other people in the courtyard, at times they were clothed, robust and aggressive like the men who shouted at him by the fountain; at times, they were just skeletons.

Wals had seen the remains of a deer once in a pool of water that became isolated from the river and dried up one year when the rains were sparse. The bones were sticking up out of the drying mud, offering some hint of the arrangement of the animal they had been a part of.

He remembered sitting by the pool for a long time looking at the whitening bones. Mab came and found him. She sat beside him, saying nothing; like him, looking at the bones. He remembered looking at Mab sitting beside him on the slope leading down to the pool, her knees drawn up, her arms wrapped round them. He looked at her wrists, the small, fragile bones under the skin. He looked at her ankles and saw the bones there as well. It frightened him that she was like the deer, that one day he might come across some other bones in some other dried out pool and know they belonged to her.

Now in the dream it was as though the bones in the pool had taken up a strange parody of animate existence and become clothed in some semblance of flesh again. They took up with the procession, both leading it and following it; all the people in the procession partaking of something of the dry, dusty deadness of the bones. He could not look at Manueline, though he knew where she was in the procession.

He came out of the dream into a half-waking state, trying to escape from the dream, only to find himself looking out into the dark courtyard; looking to where Manueline had drawn the procession in the dust. He could not tell whether he was in a dream or not, whether the dust was animated and moving as he looked or whether he was still dreaming. He cried out in his sleep, not knowing whether the sound he heard of his own voice was a thing of his dream or not, not knowing whether the dusty procession heard him or simply wasn't there at all.

Wals woke the following morning still confused by the dream, uncertain of what he had experienced in his sleep and what had been a waking hallucination, a vision that came upon him as he looked out into the courtyard.

The day continued in the same way for him. It was hard to separate cause and effect. Why the people in the courtyard chose to leave early, why the sun disappeared behind clouds that came up out of the west, why Manueline spoke very little to him though he caught her watching him through the day as though he surprised her being where he was.

He saw her catch her breath when he came into the courtyard, bringing water to fill the pot, missing the rhythm of the work at the loom. He knew there was unevenness in the cloth were the pull on the thread was disturbed by his coming and he wondered what the unevenness foretold, who would look at it and wonder where it came from. Would she see it in some time to come and remember her reaction to him, feel the pull in the thread as she wrapped the cloth around herself and remember him? Remember him being watched by her, doing as she asked. He knew her and knew she would remember.

Wals lost himself in the cloth she was weaving, feeling the shuttle as she threw it back and forth through the shed, using her foot to stretch the warp, working the mechanism of the loom with one hand as she threw the shuttle with the other, alternately switching hands as the shuttle flew from side to side. Wals let himself be drawn into the cloth, woven into it as she shifted the pattern of the cloth as he came and went around the courtyard.

By the middle of the day, he was entirely gone and stood mutely by when Manueline stopped her work at the loom and stood down from the platform as she heard the sound of people coming through the village. She turned, following the sound as the procession moved through the alleys and streets of the village, apparently not making directly for the courtyard but moving around the village, following some significant path. Manueline turning, listening and watching as they moved.

As they came closer, she could hear them singing, a faint, sad song of the coming of the winter. Manueline sang with them, looking at Wals prompting him to sing as well as the song repeated itself and the words came into his voice.

Winter wakens all my care
Now these leaves become bare
I sigh and sorely grieve
When I find myself thinking
Of this world's joy, how it comes to nothing

Now it is, now it is not
As though it had never been
What many men say, so it is
All goes where it will
We shall all die, though we like it ill.

At times, the voices in the procession made a curious sort of round out of the song. Manueline and Wals joined in. Manueline singing "Winter" as the procession finished "grieve", Wals sang "Winter" as she finished "thinking". Manueline finished the round with "like it ill", as Wals sang "now it is not".

They sang through the round several times, each time Manueline beginning on her own, Wals picking up at the same word. Once they sang the round entirely on their own and Manueline realized it was the first time she had actually heard Wals sing a full tune, though even as she sang and listened at the same time, she wasn't sure if he wasn't still changing it in some way. Then she knew the procession was approaching the courtyard gate and she fell silent, realizing as she did so that Wals had stopped on the first verse leaving her to sing on her own, "We shall die, though we like it ill".

The procession stopped at the gate. It was a large double gate, only one side of which was normally used. The two men who answered the summons in the night came in and each took one side of the gate, opening it wide and standing either side, holding the leaves of the gate.

Wals looked at the ground, not looking up to see who entered, who the gate was opened for. Unconsciously he watched Manueline and bowed when she bowed, though he stayed bent for much longer. He was aware of one of the older woman talking to Manueline and of a certain desperation in her response.

Strangely, he could not understand anything they said, as though Manueline had been teaching him some other language. He heard the intent in the old woman's voice, a sense that she would not be denied. This went on even as a whole crowd of people came in through the gate, all the people in the procession in the dust.

The old women, the men he had never seen before, the children; they all came into the courtyard. Talking, many in a loud voice meant to be heard right round the courtyard. There was no particular sense of celebration about the noise; just people skirting round old disputes, retelling old stories, confirming long held expectations. Nothing new, nothing other than the turning of the year as the dark clouds of winter came up out of the west and started to block out the sun. Soon the cold would come, the ground would freeze, the dark would descend on them and he could hear it in their voices. They were preparing for the death of the old year, resigned to it but not relishing it. The old woman came over to him, took him by the arm and led him away,

To follow this thread in the story go to: Words of His

The next section to read is: Down a Crevasse

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